I consider humanism to be a utopian, indistinct and dim concept, same as the majority of modern ideoligy principals. Why? Firstly, it rests upon the behavioral model "I treat the others as I'd like the others to treat me". But, alas, human being is selfish by nature, and this is a biological factor (some scientists state it is even genetic).
Secondly, humanism calls on kindness, which has itself been one of the most ambivalent concepts from the dawn of homo sapiens civilization. Wherein humanism relies on ethical values, and there's no need to name the number of metamorphoses of the latter during our social evolution.
Nevertheless, from my point of view humanism is the best and maximally nearby to perfect way of social behaviour for an individual. Despite all the above mentioned drawbacks, which turn even an effort to simply understand the humanism ideology into running on the edge of constantly moving blade (not to mention its practical use), the fact of awareness of necessety to respect the miracle of human personality is maybe the greatest breakthroughs of our species.
Quintessence and the main delight of humanism is expressed in ideas of secural humanism. The latter implies that a human treats the others "humanely", not caring about religion, laws, customs and traditions. Thus, a humanism requires an open and independent way of thinking. Also a humanist doesn't consider any future benefit, in comparison to, e.g., some insincere religious people, who don't choose kindness consciously, but trivally are afraid of being punished for being bad.
Humanism is partly a synonym to disinteredness. A humanist is always led by an internal curator, who is constantly seeking for beauty and moral freedom in all their manifestations. And this perpetuum mobile definitely has nothing in common with a business development manager, giving useful investment advice. To me he is sooner like a smiling buddist, offering unobtrustively (!) to forget about temporal things and to try to find inside an amazing and undescribable phenomena we call Love.
Unfortunately, humanity as a whole is not ready for humanism yet. The faster grows the number of humanism adherents, the bigger is amount of people who have simply never heard this word. What will become of us if individual values do not become social ones? I dare not suppose.
In our probably most atheistic century young minds, not posessing an image of a "good person" (which used to be provided by church), try to find it in mass media and disregard the priceless legacy, which founders and followers of humanism have left for us with one and only purpose - not to let the abstract, indistinct and fragile concept sink in the river of oblivion, for it took us too many years and mistakes to realize its importance.
I dare to call myself a humanist too, so I would not vouch for objectiveness of all written above. But one thing seems to me obvious. Nowadays humanism is the only way for us to avoid the self-destruction from inside during the persuit of dominance. And it is our duty to avoid this, at least until we state the very question, the answer to which is 42.